Bill's Book Reviews and News

Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. (Note: In some versions of IE, the profile may appear at the bottom of the page with this template; I will look into it; Mozilla works fine.) Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

Sunday, August 12, 2018

Conor Friedersdorf has a nice “booklet” articlein the Atlantic,
Aug. 9, 2018, that it is at least (or at most) a “constructive criticism” of democratic
socialism as Ocasio-Cortez could deploy it.(David Hogg seems to be supporting her on Twitter, by the way.)

The article best title is “Democratic Socialism Threatens
Minorities.” The byline is “Nothing better
protects victims of bigotry than a system where they can pursue their needs and
wants outside the realm of popular control.”

Conor takes pure socialism to mean, the people decide what
will be produced and consumed and control the means of production.That is, more or less, the workers and their
families. Ocasio hasn’t really said she would go that far, and neither really
did Bernie Sanders.Hogg will grow up
into full adulthood practicing capitalism for himself, to be sure.(After all, there’s nothing wrong with that,
nothing “to be ashamed of”) .

What Conor winds up describing is pretty much the early days
of the Soviet Union, where they really did try statist planning of everything.The Soviets continued, and eventually
imploded.

China is a little different, and we need to look at why it
works better than we would expect it to. But China is cracking down on its Muslim minorities in the western provinces (which are, to a lot of people's surprise, largely white or Caucasian).

I remember when in France I bought some antihistamines for a
cold.I paid for them privately, in a
country with socialized medicine.It is
much cheaper and more efficient to let me take care of this myself.

Conor’s point is well-taken.In a decentralized, capitalist economy with libertarian values, Muslims,
evangelical Christians, LGBTQ people, minorities can produce and sell the items
that meet the real demands of people in their own communities without central
interference, according to a free market.

Friday, August 10, 2018

Fox News last night briefly interviewed author and
journalist Masih Alinejad, a woman from Iran who lives in exile in New York
City.It was not immediately apparent if
she had won asylum in the usual manner.

Her latest book is “The Wind in My Hair: My Fight for
Freedom in Modern Iran”, from Little Brown.

She told Fox that before the 1978 revolution, deposing the
Shah and installing the Ayatollah, with the hostage crisis at the embassy which
Jimmy Carter flubbed (EDS made the daring rescue), women did well in Iran and
the society was socially reasonably progressive.The lesson of the revolution is that economic
inequality and tribal strife can indeed cause the loss of civil liberties for
everyone as revolutionaries expropriate from the privileged or force religious
rules on everyone.

Masih has been active in women’s chess, and has led protests
regarding forcing Muslim women to adhere to dress codes at international tournaments.

Thursday, August 09, 2018

As I get closer to working on my own novel manuscript, I
will start looking more closely at the self-publishing options, including POD,
as well as convention agenting (the post on Sunday Aug. 5).

I have just noted that Amazon ended its own CreateSpace
services for authors on April 18.This
did not affect the actually affect the print-on-demand.It means you have to go to a third party
company for the same services.

A user forum on CreateSpace itself presents questions from
writers on the future of the POD itself.There are no comments from Amazon on the future of the program, and the POD continues now as it always has, but you would wonder.

There is a basic business model problem with the issue as to
whether consumers really buy these books in sufficient quantity, even though
there is vanity value to authors who don’t need to sell to make a living – this
is a big philosophical problem in the business now. This could affect all POD companies, which may explain their notably more aggressive behavior with authors since about 2012. It’s also crept into the classical music
world, where getting commissions is a touchy subject for composers.

Curiously, YouTube doesn’t seem to be up to date on this issue.I’ll keep tabs on it.

Update: Aug. 12

At least for now Amazon seems to allow books with poor reputations and skimpy reviews to stay up. Look at Jason Kessler's "Badland Blues" (Kindle) and the one-sentence reviews. I won't give the Amazon link, rather Ian Shapira's Metro Section Washington Post article today. Some people do try to rescue themselves with creative writing, unsuccessfully.

There were examples of books published by Stillhouse Press
in Fairfax, VA. One of the books was “Helen on 86th
Street and Other Stories” by Wendi Kaufman.

There are also three small books of poetry by Bryan Borland,
including “Tourist” and “DIG”.

On Saturday I attended a session on “WorldBuilding” in
fiction (which applies especially to period stories and sci-fi or horror).

.

Under public pressure, Amazon has removed Nazi and white-supremacy
rated products (visible symbols).It is
not clear if books are affected (a children’s book by George Lincoln Rockwell
was said to have been removed).

Apple and Spotify have removed podcasts or other materials from the Alex Jones channel as conspiracy theories or hate speech, Yahoo story. Trump had actually promoted Alex Jones as real media in his 2016 campaign. Will Amazon follow suit? Later Monday it was reported that YouTube and Facebook had removed it. Blacklisting is contagious.

Thursday, August 02, 2018

I got an email advising me that an online bookstore site in
the UK, emphasizing independent publishers and probably self-publishers, was
for sale.It is called “Look for books”,
here.

I note that it doesn’t, on its home page, invoke https.

It also has an adult section.

It’s noteworthy for a couple reasons.Sometimes websites alone are sold as
businesses (just as Ramsay Taplin recently sold his Blogytyrant to a Wordpress
guru – haven’t seen any changes to it yet). The email and website itself does
not give a price.

Here’s my reaction.I
get questioned on why I don’t try harder to retail my own or other people’s
books with normal retail operations, with volume discounts, promotions, and the
like.The short answer is that I am
still interested mainly in developing new content (novels, music, and the news
in these blogs) and not in operations – so I would never time.

But I note the cultural shift, which started about five
years ago, and which accelerated maybe in 2014 with tensions overseas and then
really crashed with the foreign manipulation of “amateur journalism” in
conjunction with the 2016 elections by “the Russians”, etc.Starting around 2012, self-publishing assist
companies (especially POD) realized that their business models probably weren’t
sustainable indefinitely even from author fees (typically around $3000 for
high-end services) unless the books actually sold as copies (not just as
e-books or Kindle) to consumers. So they started pressuring authors to be more
interested in business and not just to leave everything to Amazon.

And then there is the whole “skin in the game” think of
Nichokas Taleb’s book of that name (May 23). “You must start a business”, Taleb
orders, rather than just talk or virtue-signal.

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Wired Magazine has published several important articles on the
way deep laws of mathematics drive physics and biology.

The most recent, July 28, is by Matalie Wolchover, and is
titled “The Peculiar Math that Could Underly the Laws of Nature”.It’s also in Quanta Magazine here.

She is a mathematician from Waterloo University in Ontario,
and has worked with Penn State on this issue.

Her argument reminds me of the progression to real variables
to complex variable in graduate school in mathematics (in my case, at Kansas University
in the 1960s). Complex gives us some beauty, like the Mandelbrot set;and Liousville Theorem may explain why the Universe
seems infinite from any point.

From complex variables you get to quaternions, and from
those to octonions.

Now quaternion field theory doesn’t follow the commutative
law, and octernions don’t even follow the associate law.I remember giving my students quiz questions
on those laws when I worked as a graduate student assistant instructor (many of
them couldn’t restate the concepts).

From octonion math you can deduce string theory, the 11
dimensions and why time behaves the way it does.You can also explain the fundamental forces
in physics, maybe, and build quarks.

Sunday, July 29, 2018

The July/August issue of The Atlantic is “The Health Report”,
has two long articles of particular importance.

Ed Yong’s “When the Next Plague Hits”, pp. 58-72, really is
like a short book.The article
particularly notes that Trump, with his diffidence to science, is much less likely
to take maintaining public health defenses seriously in the homeland than was
Obama.

The article spends some space on the latest Ebola outbreak
in the Congos, and notes that today there is a modern road to Uganda along
which it can spread.In 1995, when there
was a previous outbreak, a drive would have taken much longer. Therefore Ebola
or a similar filiovirus disease like Marburg, might spread much more quickly
than even in 2014, when parts of West Africa had a notorious outbreak. The article
gives some details as to how care for Ebola patients is provided at a medical
center at the University of Nebraska, and the burdens on medical personnel are
quite extraordinary.

CDC recommends the new Ebola virus vaccine for people going to areas
of the Congo now, but not elsewhere. This could lead to greater risks for people who work or intern today some of the other countries, like Liberia or Sierra Leone or West Africa, than might have been expected. A new epidemic might spread even more quickly now throughout the continent than it did even a few years ago, ironically because Africa is modernizing econonically so quickly.

The article also covers the science of influenza, including
the 1918 pandemic and the reoccurrence of H1N1 in 2009. We don’t seem very far along with bird flu
strains like H5N1 and H7N9. There is a lot of attention to using cellular nanotechnology
(an interest of Jack Andraka, also here March 18, 2015) to engineer an immune
response to a more stable part of most influenza viruses so that a universal influenza
vaccine could be engineered without the time delay of egg manufacture.

There is also some discussion of contact tracing and
conventional infection control, as with SARS (2003). Nigeria, normally not known
for an efficient government, was successful in stamping out Ebola in 2014.

The article focuses on the Sandtown section of Baltimore,
site of the riots in April 2015 after the police shooting of Freddie Gray.The article suggests a life expectancy less
by as much as twenty years because of the cumulative effects of compromised
opportunity and toxic environment and dangers in the ghetto.

Links

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

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